Danbooru

Newbie translator here, seeks advice.

Posted under General

Joined Danbooru because I saw something that I wanted to translate. I'm not exactly familiar with the HTML code used for notes though, and sometimes I have to refer to a different, already-translated image to check out the 'code' used in the notes.

(Eg: , <font size=+x>, , <small>, etc.)Is there a convenient list that I can refer to instead?Incidentally, is there a way to switch fonts? Sometimes I want a "shaky" effect on the text as it's often used in the original images as well.Sorry if this is incredibly obvious or otherwise dealt with before. My search-fu seems to be failing me here.Some general translation tips would be appreciated as well, especially ones not mentioned in the "howto:translate" article of the wiki.Thank you.

Updated

Well, I just wrote about:note_formatting so you (and everyone else) can take a look at that and tell me if there's anything obvious missing. (Other than my soul. I just wrote a document that recommends use of <font>, a tag that has been deprecated roughly since disco was alive, thus guaranteeing myself a place in web developer hell.)

As for font changing, it's tricky; you can do it with the font-family CSS property, but you have to have fallbacks to a generic font family which is guaranteed to be installed on everyone's computer. Moonspeaker is trying it with font-family:fantasy in post #751260, which I am of two minds about; the font change is a cool effect, but the fact that it changes to Impact, of all things, is not optimal.

glasnost said:
Well, I just wrote about:note_formatting so you (and everyone else) can take a look at that and tell me if there's anything obvious missing. (Other than my soul. I just wrote a document that recommends use of <font>, a tag that has been deprecated roughly since disco was alive, thus guaranteeing myself a place in web developer hell.)

As for font changing, it's tricky; you can do it with the font-family CSS property, but you have to have fallbacks to a generic font family which is guaranteed to be installed on everyone's computer. Moonspeaker is trying it with font-family:fantasy in post #751260, which I am of two minds about; the font change is a cool effect, but the fact that it changes to Impact, of all things, is not optimal.

Thank you. This is incredibly useful. I'll let you know if there's anything missing.

Another thing to note; I have noticed that ending tags are not strictly necessary for certain tags (like </b>, </i>, </font size=x>) if there's no additional formatting changes.

Is neglecting to put ending tags a bad thing? (possible formatting errors later on) Or is this 'feature' intentional for convenience purposes?

NNescio said:
Is neglecting to put ending tags a bad thing? (possible formatting errors later on) Or is this 'feature' intentional for convenience purposes?

I always end tags for courtesy's sake (and as a habit after some experience with HTML) but I believe there is no harm in leaving it out if the note won't be modified further.

Log said:
You should close them as not closing tags in any code is a bad habit

This, and if you develop said bad habit, it WILL come back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.

Other than that, welcome to the grind. :)

I'd continue to do more translating myself if I wasn't so mired in RL stuff, which only allows me a small time allowance for little things here and there nowadays.

recklessfirex said:
I'd continue to do more translating myself if I wasn't so mired in RL stuff, which only allows me a small time allowance for little things here and there nowadays.

You and me both, brother.

I don't know how many other translators ran into this problem when starting out, but for me, one particularly confusing thing was that, unlike pretty much everything else on the site, notes don't use DText formatting. This isn't a problem in itself, but I think it could be made a lot clearer so that people such as myself aren't left scratching their heads when the usual formatting tags fail to work. My own initial reaction was to think that notes didn't support any kind of formatting at all, and it took me quite a while to realize that they actually did, but used HTML rather than DText.

NNescio said:
Is neglecting to put ending tags a bad thing?

Absolutely. Always, always, always work under the assumption that if you don't do things properly, things will break, and it will be your fault. Not just here, but anywhere.

While there may be (and always should be) be code in place to isolate added elements like this, the purpose is not to allow mistakes for the sake of "convenience", but rather to protect the whole page from breaking when mistakes do get made in the element. But never assume that such code is there, because the day will come when it won't be...

glasnost said:
As for font changing, it's tricky; you can do it with the font-family CSS property, but you have to have fallbacks to a generic font family which is guaranteed to be installed on everyone's computer. Moonspeaker is trying it with font-family:fantasy in post #751260, which I am of two minds about; the font change is a cool effect, but the fact that it changes to Impact, of all things, is not optimal.

It's worse than that, actually; the effects are heavily dependent on both browser and OS, and "fantasy" in particular is a very poorly-defined font-family. I'm running Windows 7, with a few extra fonts installed, and for font-family:fantasy I get the following:

  • Firefox: a sans-serif font slightly different to the norm - I think it's Tahoma rather than Arial, or something
  • Internet Explorer: Impact
  • Chrome: Monotype Corsiva

As you can see from the previews above, they all look very different. I haven't yet found a way to change the "fantasy" font in Firefox at all, though you can with the other font families.

(CSS font-families are "serif", "sans-serif", "monospace", "cursive" and "fantasy". The first three are fine, "cursive" is generally okay as well - though on Windows you'll probably get MS Comic Sans, which is both ugly and doesn't look very hand-written - but "fantasy" is just a bad idea.)

You can always use explicit lists, of course - for instance, font-family:"first font, second font, generic font" (the last one should always be one of the generic CSS font families, as a fallback), but that's a bunch more work, and you run into the problem of what fonts people have available. Would it be worth asking Albert to make the CSS changes for web-font support on Danbooru?

kounishin said:
Google font API.

Looks interesting, but it appears it still has the problem that translators have to remember to specify a fallback font. I don't know if it handles the issue of the generic font families mapping to different default fonts on different systems either.

All of the problems mentioned in this thread stem from the fact that translators have to do their formatting directly in HTML. It would be much better if note formatting was done in it's own little special purpose mini-language that is translated to HTML, in the same way that comment formatting is done in DText.

Thanks guys. I'll try to avoid fonts for now.

Recently I find the Greasemonkey script to be incredibly useful, 'though sometimes it causes a runaway with Firefox's resource usage, which is probably partly due to my habit of leaving a lot of tabs/windows open.

1